The Past - Paperback

by Tessa Hadley (Author)

The "supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence (New York Times Book Review) turns her astute eye to a dramatic family reunion, where simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over three long, hot summer weeks.

"A novel so evocative of summer and adolescence that to read it is to reexperience the deep languor and longing of those days." -- Tayari Jones, O Magazine

"Exquisite. . . . For anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, the book offers similar deep pleasures." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

Winner of the Windham Campbell Prize - A Washington Post Best Book of the Year - A Time Best Book of the Year - A San Francisco Chronicle Top 10 Book of the Year - A Huffington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year - A New York Times Editors' Choice

Three sisters and a brother, complete with children, a new wife, and an ex-boyfriend's son, descend on their grandparents' dilapidated old home in the Somerset countryside for a final summer holiday. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past--their mother took them there to live when she left their father--but now, they may have to sell it. And beneath the idyllic pastoral surface lie tensions. As the family's stories and silences intertwine over the course of three long, hot weeks, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of life--bourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglican--winds down to its inevitable end.

Back Jacket

"An exquisite writer, a writer's writer, with a fine eye for detail and a way of crafting sentences that make you stop and inhale . . . Hadley should be a bestseller rather than literary fiction's best kept secret."--The Times (London)

Three sisters and a brother, complete with children, a new wife, and an ex-boyfriend's son, descend on their grandparents' dilapidated old home in the Somerset countryside for a final summer holiday, where simmering tensions and secrets rise to the surface over three long, hot weeks.The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past--their mother took them there to live when she left their father--but now, they may have to sell it. And beneath the idyllic pastoral surface lie tensions.

Sophisticated and sleek, Roland's new wife (his third) arouses his sisters' jealousies and insecurities.
Kasim, the twenty-year-old son of Alice's ex-boyfriend, becomes enchanted with Molly, Roland's sixteen-year-old daughter. Fran's young children make an unsettling discovery in an abandoned cottage in the woods that shatters their innocence. Passion erupts where it's least expected, leveling the quiet self-possession of Harriet, the eldest sister. As the family's stories and silences intertwine, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of life--bourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglican--winds down to its inevitable end.

Over five novels and two collections of stories, Tessa Hadley has earned a reputation as a fiction writer of remarkable gifts. She brings all of her considerable skill to The Past, a work of breathtaking scope and beauty--her most ambitious and accomplished novel yet.